James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldonby
Julie Phillips

We've
been waiting for this one for a long, long time. Alice Sheldon --
more widely known under her nom
de plume,
James Tiptree, Jr. -- is, in our opinion, the most
significant science fiction writer since Philip K Dick (and then some),
but is still far from gaining the wide readership and critical
acceptance that her writings warrant. More than this, she may
very well have led the most intriguing life of any science fiction
writer in history, and now, with this biography, her life story will at
last be told in what we fervently hope will be a fully fleshed out
account. This book has been in the works for quite some time, and
we were frankly worried that it might never see the light of day.
Thankfully, we we were wrong and the book is now on our shelves.

James
Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
is the perfect biography. Its subject is an important literary
figure who led a singularly fascinating life, one that intersected with
diverse strands and key areas of American life and is richly deserving
of recording, yet one that is surprisingly little recognized, vastly
under appreciated and sparsely documented. This confluence has
given author, Julie Phillips the literary equvalent of a splendid
unexplored virgin forest covered in untrammeled snow through which she
can romp, taking us -- her readers -- along for a one-of-a-kind magical
mystery tour.

The
themes of this biography are multiple and diverse -- issues of class
and race, politics and imperialism, definitions of feminism, family
relations, the possibilities of marriage, homosexuality and
heterosexuality, war and peace, power and paranoia, and much else
besides. Taken together they form a solar system of ideas, all
orbiting around the bright shining sun at its core:
human sexuality and the question of its relation to gender
construction. And this is only fitting and right for it is this
very quandary that lies at the center of Tiptree's own work, which
will, as a result of this fine biography, now be more readily
apprehended by the wider readership that it so richly deserves.

Carter
Scholz has written a detailed review
containing a capsule summary of the biography that we encourage you to
read.

To
learn a bit about Tiptree's writings, go to our review of the excellent
collection of her stories, Her Smoke Rose
Up Forever. Buy the book. Read it. See.